While at MySQL, one of the complaints I used to receive every now and then had to do with MySQL’s performance in the area of UNION’s. I distinctly remember one user group meeting where folks from one government agency told me they couldn’t use UNION at all in their application because the performance was so slow.

Now this isn’t always the case with MySQL, but I’ll admit I have seen bad speed on some UNION queries. And that’s one of the reasons I&rsquRead More...

While at MySQL, one of the complaints I used to receive every now and then had to do with MySQL’s performance in the area of UNION’s. I distinctly remember one user group meeting where folks from one government agency told me they couldn’t use UNION at all in their application because the performance was so slow.

Now this isn’t always the case with MySQL, but I’ll admit I have seen bad speed on some UNION queries. And that’s one of the reasons I&rsquRead More...

This Thursday (November 26th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia will present the Spider Storage Engine. This session was originally scheduled for October 15th but had to be postponed for technical reasons.

Here's from the abstract: Everybody needs sharding. Which is not easy to maintain. Being tied to the application layer, sharding is hard to export and to interact with. The Spider storage engine, a plugin for MySQL 5.1 and later, solves the problem in a transparent way. It is an extension of partitioning. Using this engine, the user can deal transparently with multiple backends in the server layer. This means that the data is accessible from any application without code changes. This lecture …

This Thursday (November 26th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia will present the Spider Storage Engine. This session was originally scheduled for October 15th but had to be postponed for technical reasons.

Here's from the abstract: Everybody needs sharding. Which is not easy to maintain. Being tied to the application layer, sharding is hard to export and to interact with. The Spider storage engine, a plugin for MySQL 5.1 and later, solves the problem in a transparent way. It is an extension of partitioning. Using this engine, the user can deal transparently with multiple backends in the server layer. This means that the data is accessible from any application without code changes. This …

For a lot of log processing, I need to store IP addresses in a database table. The standard process was always to convert it to an unsigned int in perl or php and then insert it. Today I discovered an easier way. MySQL's INET_ATON function. It takes an address in dotted quad format and converts it into an INT. So, all you have to do is this:

INSERT INTO table (ip) VALUES (INET_ATON('$ip_address'));

And done.

I had an interesting discussion with 2 colleagues about the possible interest of putting the swap space of a system on a SSD.

If I consider the gain in latency that an SSD brings versus a capacity disk - in the region of 100x - the solution seems obvious. Swapping - or more precisely paging - must be much faster/ with an SSD. Since RAM is expensive versus SSD, I could even be tempted to design a system with a small amount of RAM and a large amount of swap space on SSDs. In other words, I can ask myself if trying to prevent my system to page is still a good fight?

Let's try to shed some light on these questions.

Paging takes place when my system runs out of RAM because more processes are created or because existing processes requires more memory (check this article for details about how to monitor …

I had an interesting discussion with 2 colleagues about the possible interest of putting the swap space of a system on a SSD.

If I consider the gain in latency that an SSD brings versus a capacity disk - in the region of 100x - the solution seems obvious. Swapping - or more precisely paging - must be much faster/ with an SSD. Since RAM is expensive versus SSD, I could even be tempted to design a system with a small amount of RAM and a large amount of swap space on SSDs. In other words, I can ask myself if trying to prevent my system to page is still a good fight?

Let's try to shed some light on these questions.

Paging takes place when my system runs out of RAM because more processes are created or because existing processes requires more memory (check this article for details about how to …

France FORUM PHP 2009 was held last week in Paris (12th and 13th nov) at Cite des sciences et de l'industrie Thanks to LeMuG (the french MySQL User Group) MySQL has had a nice set of presentations :

Michael Widenius aka Monty ( Monty Program Ab ) presented "MariaDB, the future of MySQL". Johannes Schluter (MySQL connectors dev team + release manager of PHP 5.3) has presented "PHP and MySQL - A good match" This was the closing presentation for the 2 days but audience stayed to hear about the nice functionalities of the mysqlnd driver. A lot of interest for the new features (some experimental) : persistent connections, performance statistics, asynchronous request, client side cache, streams + filter, statistics collection, PDO + mysqlnd good match.

When Twitter decided to slowly roll out a new, official retweeting feature, people waited in anticipation. When they let their users know what it might look like, people debated whether that was the right way to deploy it. When it actually became available, people almost universally disliked it.

But my post is about why I love the new Twitter retweet feature, without ever having to think about it. The reason is that official retweeting represents the new-new arms race for authority among power users. The new-new arms race, you say? Yes, because the new arms …

What you do when you're fed up with a script? Right, you write your own.

You'll have to excuse me for the long shell script you'll find here below, but I'm not going to bother putting it on some download website.

It's a shell script which starts and stops the MySQL server. Indeed, a replacement for the init.d script found in the MySQL distributions. I'm using it personally on my Macs and it's not supported in any way.

But why? Well, I'm playing with MySQL Workbench, Server Administration. The MySQL init.d script didn't work right away (oh, various reasons for that), so I used mine. So I figured it might be useful for others and it's not complicated or shocking-new-stuff.

If you want to use it, you'll have to edit the 2 variables at the top. It's only …